


dive and disappear without a trace (i just want to be someone)

by heartofsilverseas



Category: The Impossible | Lo Imposible (2012)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Lucas Bennett Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Not Beta Read, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Triggers, content warnings can be found in chapter end notes, they all have PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 11:15:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28544679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofsilverseas/pseuds/heartofsilverseas
Summary: His nightmares are filled with wet skin and bloody hair and rough tree bark under his hands and the medicinal smell of bleach and a sticker on his shirt with his name on it.
Relationships: Henry Bennett/Maria Bennett
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	1. the moments when you're in so deep (it feels easier to just swim down)

**Author's Note:**

> title from Someone To You by BANNERS

Lucas wakes up in periodic flashes throughout the night. His nightmares are filled with wet skin and bloody hair and rough tree bark under his hands and the medicinal smell of bleach and a sticker on his shirt with his name on it. He wakes, and shoots up gasping like he always does, legs tangled up in the sheets and pillow well out of sight. His throat feels like sandpaper and charcoal while his breath like muddy mornings and rotting bodies on the road.

He’s still reeling from his nightmares, still seeing flashes of bloodied water, and he’s so out of it that he instinctively reaches for the mug of water on his nightstand before he knows what he’s doing. But once the cool ceramic touches his lips, his mouth opens like the traitor it is, and Lucas can feel the water caressing his tongue and slithering down his throat. 

The water tastes like ash and debris and dirt and blood and then he’s _underwater, mouth open, gasping for air that isn’t there, clawing at branches, bricks, the bodies of drifting people, debris hitting him from left, right, up, down, thrusting him around in the water like a doll on a child’s whims, making his head spin from both dizziness and blood loss as he fights the push and pull of the water that feels like a throbbing heartbeat, and he can’t scream because there’s no air left in his lungs (or maybe it’s because he knows that there’s no one left to hear him. He saw his dad and his brothers go under the water and his mum slam into that glass. He didn’t see them come back up—he knows what that means)_ and then his hands let go of the mug and it falls to the floor with a crash. 

Lucas flinches, rips the sticky blanket off his body, and slides down the bed until his bare feet are flat against the hardwood floor. It’s cold, smooth, tough, and he focuses on that to ground himself back into this time, where he can feel his heartbeat thumping away in a vein on his leg and his hands shivering under the cold air and his tongue fat in his mouth, where he’s in his room (safe, he’s _safe,_ so why does everything feel like danger? Why does each shadow seem to lurk with unseen enemies and a ticking clock transform into a bomb and a whisper feel like a scream?) instead of under the shadow of a wave that killed thousands. 

He pads towards his brothers’ room and rests his hand on top of the doorknob, the metal hard and cold against his palm like the floor under his feet, and Lucas stays there for a second, staring at the door just a few inches from his face. There are scratches on it, consequences of growing up in a house with two other boys, and his eyes linger on the scratches for a moment, drinking in each dip and curve and outline. The door is scarred, just like the mug still resting on his bedroom floor and the two sleeping boys behind the door in front of him and his parents downstairs and the doctors and veterans from the tsunami and his grandfather on the telephone and Lucas-

Lucas is scarred from the tsunami, its wave washing over him in his vision and his dreams like a curtain of hellfire, leaving bloody gashes and raw burns and whisping smoke in its wake. His skin has scabs that never healed and violin-string scars, silver and thin and _it hurts, oh god, it hurts_ wrapped around his flesh, a tattoo he never wanted branding him to his past.

He rests his forehead on the door for a beat, then ventures to the living room, his feet stepping down the stairs in a rhythmic pattern that becomes oddly soothing with time. Arranging himself on the sofa is a quiet affair, the furniture sinking with his weight and the weight of a dozen sleepless nights, and he settles with the remote in one hand and a pillow clutched in another. His brothers join him at some point when the sky behind the translucent curtains takes on an ugly shade of grey and Brandon on the screen has just slapped his boyfriend. Lucas doesn’t tear his eyes from the screen to look at his brothers, but he doesn’t need to anyway because they have come together on so many nights since Thailand that it’s practically routine. 

His brothers crawl on each side of him; Simon with a soft stuffed toy grasped between his tiny hands and Thomas with a comfort blanket dangling from his mouth. Lucas smiles, even though it feels like his skin is stretched too wide, too thin, like a rope tied taut on the branches of a tree, or his arm, reaching across the mattress screaming _mum, mum, mum!-_ , and his brothers lean on his torso and they all watch the television together silently.

Their parents find them like this, curled up on the sofa, television still on and snores filling the room. Lucas’ eyes are a little pink from staring at the screen for hours, but he can’t move, not when his two brothers are using him as a human pillow, but he can’t sleep either, can’t close his eyes, because then the flashes of light he sees underneath his eyelids with turn into flashes of sunlight breaking through the debris and surface of the water and he’ll be back _there_ again. 

His dad stares at him with old eyes (old, so old, when were they so old?) and talks with a soft voice and a rumble that Lucas can’t help but compare to the sound the ground made right before the tsunami hit. “You up for school today?” his dad asks, with old eyes and the voice of trembling earth, and with the same words he asks every morning since Lucas and his brothers were cleared to go back to school.

Lucas is never up for school, wants nothing more than to curl up in his bed, trying not to taste or smell his tears on the pillow that remind him of the ocean, to put his headphones on and drown the world in music instead of water, but he knows that once he says no, he’ll never say yes again, will never leave his room unless absolutely necessary, will just turn into a hollow shell of what Lucas Bennett once was, and he didn’t survive a tsunami just to waste away the rest of his life. 

Lucas has once heard that more soldiers die from suicide once they come home than ones that die on the battlefield. (Is he a soldier? He feels like one, his heart hardened from battle and his eyes holding visions he can never unsee.) So he nods, watches his parents’ faces brighten just a little bit more, like every time he’s ever said _yes_ to school, and he tries desperately not to shake his head instead and scream _no!_ and clutch the sofa just like how he clutched to the base of the electric tower as the water tried to push him away from his family. It works. Barely.

  
_they say that i am the sick boy,  
easy to say when you don't take the risk, boy_  


  
\- the chainsmokers, _sick boy_  


School is...school, he supposes. The actual work is easy after he threw himself into reading and researching and learning to fill up the time for when he was supposed to be sleeping and eating and playing. The numbers and words that used to swim around his head start to make sense, and he wonders if this is what it feels like to be smart. 

His grades have jumped sky-high compared to what they were before, before the sleepless nights and endless days and grey skies from an airplane window, and Lucas has had quite a few teachers pull him aside and accuse him of cheating, even retaken a couple of tests just to make sure, but once it was clear he was clean, people have gone from suspicious to grudgingly impressed. At least the tsunami and the nightmares have done something good. (As if that could make up for what it did to him and his family.)

His friends are gone now, little more than vaguely familiar faces in the cafeteria crowd, ever since he pushed them all away, ignoring their texts and sending their calls to voicemail. (Ever since he realised that he doesn’t need them, never had, and they were all part of different worlds now, ones where Lucas had flashbacks and nightmares and triggers and panic attacks while they had games and gossip and sports practice and crushes.) (Ever since he realised that he would never fit into their world, and they would never fit into his, so it was pointless to even try.) 

They’re still bitter about it, still confused, shooting him glances during class and spreading rumours and lies, but Lucas has long since past caring about their stupid words, not when there are dangers in the world so big and so real, dangers that didn’t just live in black-and-white documentaries and trashy films, dangers that people like his ex-friends would never be able to even imagine.

Time passes by in school like being underwater all over again; sluggish, smooth, wet, thick, and he knows that time is moving, can feel it sliding, slick between his fingertips and suffocating under his tongue, but he can also feel it stuttering, flowing until he reaches his next trigger (a football rolling on the field turns into a bright red rubber ball under his foot, sweat dripping down his temples turns into salty water spraying his face, a pencil in his grip turns into a wet tree trunk under his hands), then suddenly Lucas is back _there_ again, underwater or in a hospital or in a wrecked place that was once a paradise, and time practically _stops,_ and he feels familiar _desperationconfusionfearfearfear_ pounding in his chest until he opens his eyes and a concerned teacher or classmate is standing over him, moving their mouths and saying words he can’t hear over the sound of rushing water.

It happens twice today, once by a dodgeball hitting his side that turns into a brick digging into his bare flesh, and another when the toilet pipes burst and it floods the floor and his eyes are _wide, wide, wide, he’s there again, he’s there-._ Lucas knows that the teachers are on the verge of sending him home, but his parents have enough to deal with, with his dad’s job and eye appointments and his mum’s treatments and physio, so he manipulates his lips into soft smiles and says quiet words and forces his body language to be open (open, open, open, that’s what’s gonna get him killed one day) so they reluctantly let him back into class. 

(And if he spends the entire math lesson digging his nails into his palm and fighting another flashback because the person on his neighbouring desk spilled the contents of their water bottle all across the floor, well...what they don’t know won’t hurt them.)

Then the lunch bell rings, shrill and rattling and loud in his ears, so much like a scream for help amongst rotting bodies that Lucas flinches at the sound, even though he’s been staring at the ticking clock for the last fifteen minutes, and uncurls his hand. A single drop of blood flies onto the textbook open in front of him, and he slams the book shut before anyone notices. (But no one will, he knows, because they’re not like him—they keep their eyes in front of them and their thoughts free from death and their hearts on their sleeve. They’re not like him, who keeps his cards close to his chest and his dreams filled with drowning and his eyes darting from a danger unseen and unknown. After all, no one saw the first wave coming, nor the second. He won’t be caught off guard. Not again.) 

He walks out the doorway and into the hallway, and his trainers hit the floor with a dull thump. It echoes around the walls softly, but it shudders like a gunshot (or the rumbling ground right before the water hit). Lucas keeps his back hunched, eyes low, and he can see his stretched-out shadow in front of him moving to his beat, and walks with his hands in his pockets until the noise from the cafeteria gradually grows louder.

Lucas swipes a bottle of water and an apple from the food stand, avoiding the tangerines displayed proudly ( _the woman spasms, an unknown force tugging the strings of her body as she starts throwing up blood, dark, gooey, revolting blood, and like a disease, his mum starts doing the same thing until there’s blood and spit and seaweed flying everywhere and sticking to the railing and landing on the floor with a sick splat, and doctors and nurses and volunteers surround him and hold his mum but all he can see is the tangerine pieces still clutched in his hand-_ ) before hurrying out of the cafeteria and making his way to the other side of the school. He’s not supposed to go to that area, but his brothers are there, and if a tsunami couldn’t keep them apart, a couple of sleep-deprived hangry teachers wouldn’t either.

His brothers are waiting for them on the bench (their bench, because Lucas is the mysterious older kid that sits there every lunch with them and has a glare that can cut diamonds, and clothes that scream _don’t test me,_ and his brothers are following in his footsteps, so everyone avoids the bench and scatters when they see him coming.) (Lucas tries to ignore the fact that people scattered when they saw the tsunami coming too.) 

They sit in silence. He listens to the birds (squawking birds, rushing out of the trees like a warning message they never received.) (Not before it was too late, at least.) and Thomas turns his face to the sun like a sunflower and Simon fidgets and scrapes the wood of the bench with his fingernails, and they all say nothing, but their company screams _I love you_ and _I’m here_ and _I won’t ever go, I’ll stay by your side even if it kills me_ and it feels like a promise and a binding and a chain and a peace felt like no other all at once. They say nothing, speak nothing, because their worlds before were filled with empty promises and happiness taken for granted and words flowing in and words flowing out of their minds and their mouths and their hearts.

Now, their worlds live in soft brushes of fingertips and elbows knocked together and hot breaths next to their ears when they think the other is asleep and hands running through hair and a thousand messages conveyed through eyes. They say nothing, speak nothing, because words feel like earthquakes tumbling out of their lips and floods resting on their tongue and dead bodies splayed out on their molars, rotting their gums and their breath and their heart and their soul until all that’s left is black like the charred edges of the explosion of a nuclear bomb. So. They say. _Nothing._

Eventually, he knows that it’s time to go (but he doesn’t want to go; not yet, not ever. All he ever wants to do is hold his brothers close and never let go) so they reluctantly part ways and Lucas walks back to his side of the campus, clutching an apple core and an empty water bottle close to his chest. He walks back to the echoing hallway, now filled to the brim with students that whisper every time he passes them and teachers eyeing him like they know something’s wrong but it’s not their place to say. (That doesn’t stop them from saying it anyway, if the conversations leaking out of cracked doors is anything to go by.) 

Lucas settles in the back of the classroom, hanging one hand down until it brushes the legs of the chair. He presses two fingers against the icy-cold plastic like he’s checking for a pulse, and he can feel time rattling in the confines of the desk and the wooden floor. Time is a beast, haunting and hounding until all is lost and the only thing left is time because time is _selfishgreedyisloatedlonelyscared_ and it knows nothing except to be alone in its glory. It moves fast and slow, depending on its mood and the mood of the people, on convenience and pleasure and leisure and schedule, and Lucas doesn’t know if he hates it for that or not.

(Time does none of that. It moves forward mechanically, like the heart rate monitor that was attached to his mum’s finger, and he knows what would have happened if the beeping had stopped. Worlds would crash and burn and stars would wither into dust and the ground would rumble and Lucas knows he would go through a thousand more tsunamis rather than lose his mum.) (He wonders what that says about him.)

When the bell rings again, the sound seems to wrap around and pierce his ear, making his teeth rattle and heart skip a beat. There are a thousand footsteps reverberating in the school, all rushing to escape the prison (No wonder his parents want him here—it’s a prison, a minefield of triggers and agony, made just for him. They must know about his failures, how he wanted to abandon the voice under the debris and how he left his mum on the hospital bed and how he nearly broke the tree branch when they were drowning and how he closed the curtain to prevent their whole family from reuniting sooner. They must know, and so they put him in here, day after day.) that school was, and so Lucas waits a few seconds until the crowd has practically halved its size, before venturing out of the school gates. He walks with Thomas holding his hand and Simon on his back, and then they walk home together.

His dad is there to greet them, glasses perched precariously on his nose and a magazine on his lap that gets put down once he spots them making their way through the doorway. Lucas would stay in his dad’s company for as long as possible on a regular day, would bask in the feeling of _alive, alive, alive!_ any time, but he is so, so tired today, and so he makes a beeline to his room and shuts the door despite his dad’s worried gaze hot on his neck, and fits a pair of headphones over his ears. 

Music helps him like it always has every day ever since the tsunami, and he collapses onto the bed, kicking off his shoes at the last second. Lucas closes his eyes and picks apart the music with his mind. Ground base. Melody. Pre-chorus. Bridge. Harmony. Cello. Drums. They all feel so _rightcompletecorrectperfect_ in his head, in a way he knows no amount of studying and reading can replicate, and he lies there for a moment, face smooshed into the pillow, creases forcing their way into his skin, taking apart the music piece by piece like twisting a pen and fiddling with the ink and the cap and the spring until he falls asleep.

Sleep is never peaceful, he knows. Sometimes Lucas stares at the cracks on his ceiling for hours or sits in front of the television and opens a bag of crisps or sneaks downstairs and buries his nose into his mum’s neck and waits until the sun comes up to avoid the demons waiting to latch their claws under his skin. But when he does manage to fall asleep, it’s seldom restful.

This time, he’s falling in eternal darkness, like Alice down the rabbit hole or Percy falling into Tartarus, heart-jumping and waiting for something he doesn’t know yet and lips cracked and eyes squeezed shut and the wind whistling in his ears feel like the roar of a crashing wave as it brings telephone poles and palm trees and buildings down. The air turns cold and he has a moment of utter horror before he lands with a mighty splash into the water.

Everything is clear blue for a second, as the water burns his eyes before it turns murky and brown and tainted with thick red blood that swirls and blends into the darkness. There are contorted shadows all around him, stretched pockets of black and navy and maroon that twist into a sick paradox of the kaleidoscope of colours inside a bubble. His vision blacks out in flashes, one second his view full of blood and brown and the next with a terrifying onyx, and it goes on and off until a beam of light breaks through the murkiness. 

Lucas gasps (How does he gasp? He’s underwater and he can’t _breathe-_ ) and claws at the water, helplessly raking at it with his fingernails and gnashing at it with his teeth, until he is stubbornly fighting his way towards the light and the surface before his hand makes contact with air. It feels like a whole other world of drowning.

He wakes up, jolting and terrified, with air in his lungs yet somehow none at all, and he puts a hand to his chest and gasps desperately, scrabbling at the blankets and the air ( _air, air, air, please I need air!_ ) and he wants to scream but can’t, can’t open his mouth and move his vocal cords and squeeze sound past his lips, and for one horrifying second Lucas thinks he’s going to black out ( _there is no air why is there no air_ ) but then he takes in a huge breath through his mouth and the back of his throat burns and then he’s coughing (just like his mum on that hospital bed, _stop it, mum, stop it!_ ) his lungs out, wheezing and gasping again, chest spasming and hands shaking until the racket stops, then finally, _finally,_ he can feel the air, can work his mouth and his nose like what he’s been doing since he was born, and he can _breathe_ again.

The first breath of air always feels wrong, feels like an invisible cheese grater rubbing the inside of his nose and throat raw, but it’s overtaken by relief and joy as he takes in a breath, then another, then another. It’s something so simple, and yet somehow it feels like the most difficult thing in the world. (In. Out. In. Out.) His eyes are a little watery and his inhales shaky and his head is fuzzing a bit on the edges, and he knows he can’t sleep again tonight (and the thought of trying makes him want to stop breathing all over again). (In. Out. In. Out.) He puts one hand on the headboard to support himself as he scrambles out of the bed and pauses a little to catch his breath. (In. Out. In. Out.) 

Lucas stumbles out of his room, out of the house, out of his mind ( _You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret—all the best people are_ ) and into the garden, where a thousand crickets are having a party and moths are creating eerie shadows in the little light the moon provides, and takes a seat next to his brother. The grass tickles his bare feet and rain teases the chilly air, but his brother wraps tiny, skeletal fingers around Lucas’ wrist, and heat fills his body instead of pink-gold, rose-dusted Japanese cold.

Thomas glances at him, and his eyes, skin, hair, mouth, ask _do you need love?_ Lucas can only nod as his shoulders shake and his hands shiver before Thomas wraps his arms around him, soft and warm and a welcome fireplace against his cold skin. Sobs tumble from Lucas’ mouth ( _blood and seaweed onto the hard hospital floor-_ ), and tears wet his brother’s shirt and a salty aftertaste makes its way down his throat, which Lucas tries to get rid of every time he manages to swallow.

“Breathe,” his brother whispers in his ear, tickling his cheek with a soft breath, and Lucas lets one last hollow sound flee his mouth before he sucks in a shallow breath. Thomas glances at his face, and Lucas knows what he looks like: cheeks flush with red, wet with tear tracks, eyes puffy, hair in a mess, and throat contracting like a fish out of water (ironic, he knows, but the simile feels fitting all the same)—and yet, Thomas looks at him with nothing but love and tenderness that Lucas knows he doesn’t deserve.

The tsunami wrecked Lucas, threw him into the waves and drowned him and cut him and bruised him and tore his childhood and his life away before leaving him as a broken pile of glass of what he once was. He doesn’t understand how Thomas can still love him, can still stand with him, by his side, supporting him and dealing with his messes and screams and nightmares and panic attacks. 

Then he remembers the tsunami took Thomas too, forced him to climb to the top of that tree and never let go until he heard their dad’s voice over the rushing water, and how Thomas doesn’t have panic attacks or flashbacks, doesn’t scream or do _anything_ for days on end. He doesn’t remember to eat, sometimes, or sleep or brush his teeth or shower or talk or _move_ if they don’t distract him and make him laugh or cry or do something other than be the ghost the tsunami has turned him into. (Lucas wonders if this is why their family seeks each other on sunless days and starless nights, why they find comfort in each other’s arms and body and words, if it’s because they’re all kindred spirits, souls cracked from the worst nature could throw at them.)

And so Lucas realises this, wonders this, remembers this, thinks about this, holds these thoughts in the palm of his hand and runs a delicate finger through it with a feather-like touch, and breaks down in his brother’s arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from It's Quiet Uptown by the musical Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda, Phillipa Soo, Renee Elise Goldsberry, the Original Broadway Cast of Hamilton)
> 
> content warnings: nightmares, flashbacks, canonical violence (from nature) and gore, mention of soldier suicide, very minor self-harm (digging fingernails into skin, barely draws blood), self-blame, panic attack


	2. i hold my breath, i can’t see what comes next (i don’t know when i’ll see dry land again)

It’s one of those nights where Lucas is haunted by insomnia instead of nightmares, and so he settles down on the top step of the stairs and peers into the darkness, head resting on his arms with his knees pressed close to his chest and bare feet resting on the cool floor. 

The darkness seems to curl and dance before his very eyes, and he can hear a high-pitched ringing in the air, like the sound right after he _broke the surface, mouth open, eyes closed, ears ringing with nothing and everything all at once, a cacophony of sound and silence,_ a quiet sort of loudness whistling through the air like a bullet in the dark that’s broken only by the quiet shuffle behind the door downstairs, and he leans forward automatically, even though he already knows what’s happening.

His mum is haunted by demons of the past, Furies from the Underworld who whips her ankles and curse her name every time she tries to slow down from running away from them. He knows she has nightmares too, of a page hitting the glass and seaweed spilling from her lips and a door on her back and the cool plastic of a breathing mask on her face and a leg dragged through hell and back. 

He can already picture it—his mum, waking up from a nightmare, shooting up, gasping (just like him, and he finds a small, sick sort of satisfaction that he’s not the only one), and with a hand pressed to her chest and the other clutching her leg, with phantom pains pulsing through her body like a nightclub’s bass. Her hair would be a mess, but his dad would smooth it down with hands that dwarf her own and kiss her silent tears away until the salt in the air is replaced by his low voice, and he would hold her in his arms like how Thomas held Lucas in the garden, and his parents would clutch each other until the sun’s first rays shined on their hair like halos.

Or maybe it would be his dad having a nightmare instead. He would wake up screaming, familiar names dying on his lips ( _“Lucas! Maria!”_ ), the images of a barren wasteland fading on the edges of his vision, the feeling of a rubber ball trapped under debris under his hands, and the wisps of fragile hope curled around his heart. 

His dad wasn’t touched by the water’s curse—not like Lucas and his mum was, but their names ( _“Lucas!”_ ) have rotted their way into his throat, and he would wake up with hands cupped around his mouth as if to amplify the sound, eyes darting, flitting its gaze back and forth across the ceiling, searching for something that was never there ( _“...Maria?”_ ), and his mum would shush him quietly and Simon would squirm in between them from out of nowhere and tickle his dad until laughter mixed with tears.

Tonight, Lucas doesn’t know if it’s his mum or his dad suffering, or both or neither, but there’s sound slicing through his darkness, not the numb-aching quiet only the dead can make, and he’ll take sound over that any day.

  
_and i don't want to be a monster in the making,  
i don't want to be more bitter than sweet,  
i don't know how to be just standing by blankly  
not getting angry_  


Lucas wakes up from another nightmare, one where he can’t remember what it was about, but there are dried tear tracks on his cheeks, stretching his skin onto the wrong side of uncomfortable, and his pillow is a mess of snot and spit, so he doesn’t want to know anyway. 

His throat is raw and the air is filled with the echoes of his screams, and suddenly everything feels too tight and the walls threaten to constrict him like a coffin ( _“Don’t do that to me, mum!”_ ) ( _“Simon and Thomas are dead!”_ ) and then he wants to get out of his room, the one containing all his past self’s memories and moments, but he’s a stranger to himself now. Lucas can’t feel like he belongs in this room, this house, this _world_ anymore, not when the tsunami took everything from him, and so all he can feel is _fearterrorclaustrophobiapanic_ coursing through his veins and he wants to get out _now._

He can feel himself scrabbling down the stairs and sliding his hand down the railing and his feet thumping on the hard floor, but everything else blurs. The next thing he knows, he’s fumbling with the latch to the garden door until it gives a satisfying click and then Lucas is _out._

Wind strokes his face like a soft hand, stained with mud and blood and dirt and salt but smooth all the same, and he takes in a breath of the cold air (It feels like the moment his mum opened her eyes again.) and he digs his hand into the cracks in the wall, bits of vines getting tangled up in his fingers. He remembers the garden, once beautiful and delightful for all who laid their eyes on it, now overtaken with weeds and vines, and the only glimpse of the prized flowers he gets is flashes of bright colours behind the huge blanket of green.

Sudden anger crashes over him like a wave, and Lucas pulls his hand away from the wall, closing his fingers together and tearing weeds with a satisfying sound. Why did the tsunami get to take _everything_ from them? 

Lucas remembers afternoons where his mum tended the garden to perfection, planting seeds just right and harvesting tomatoes and lettuce with care, and how, when he was younger, his mum would put her hand on top of his and they would water the plants together, side by side. The garden brought her joy. Real, sheer joy that he rarely got to see once his grandmother died. But now, his mum couldn’t even bend down to _look_ at her flowers before crying out as her leg protested and her chest ached.

There’s rage bubbling within him. Every tweet of a bird, every gust of wind, every flash of colour makes him want to heave and claw his eyes out. He screams an unholy sound, can feel the vibrations in his neck (better than the silence the water forces down his throat) and the hiss of breath in the air once it leaves his mouth. 

He screams and drops to his knees, can vaguely feel bits of pebble digging in his knees through his pyjama trousers, and tears out the weeds bit by bit. It’s satisfying, the way it resists slightly, roots digging in the earth in an act of defiance ( _his brother clinging to a tree_ ) before they uproot and make his hand fly with the sudden lack of resistance on their part ( _water lazily pushing his mum’s slack body_ ) ( _“Mum!”_ ). 

The weeds feel scratchy in his palm, coated with dirt and bugs and damp with last night’s rain ( _wet, wet, wet, water flying everywhere, weaving through his hands and his hair and he wants it gone, he wants it gone_ now-), and Lucas curls his hand around it for a second, crushing the leaves until it’s little more than balls of brown and green, before uncurling his fists and letting it go, watching it fall to the ground, before pulling some more.

Lucas’ movements are frantic, rushed, jerky as if something was possessing his body, and he continues to tear and pull and rip the leaves and the flowers away until there are no more of those left to destroy. 

When he’s done with it, but can still feel anger in his veins, bubbling up under his skin, wanting him to destroy _everything (the second wave, rushing over debris and telephone poles_ ) ( _“Go under!”_ ) ( _“Lucas!”_ ), he- he doesn’t know what he does next, not exactly, but he remembers the sharp edges of rocks in his palm and a snarl on his face as he throws it (he doesn't know where—why doesn’t he know where?) _somewhere._

He can feel blood on his knees the same way he can taste salt on his tongue and fresh rain on his nose, but his vision is blurry on the edges and his ears are ringing and sometimes his fingers go numb and there are gaps in his memory, and he lets out one last scream, and- and-

-he collapses onto the floor (or was he there the whole time? Lucas doesn’t know, just like how he didn’t know if Simon and Thomas were dead or lost or crying under debris like Daniel, or if his dad was buried under bricks of what was once a paradise’s swimming pool, or if there are families he could have brought together but didn’t because he was too busy screaming for his mum, he doesn’t _know_ ) (He’s sick of not knowing.) and bangs his fists on the ground as if it’s going to do anything. The anger, furious, boiling anger, and need to just _scream_ until his skin withers away and his eyes turn into empty sockets and his bones rot, retreats with every thump of skin on stone until Lucas is left laying on the cold, hard ground. 

He stays like that for a few moments (or an hour? Two? Each blink and breath stretches on and bundles together in a ball so tight it seems like it’s a constrictor’s knot, pulling tighter and tighter the more he tries to unravel it.), chest heaving and mouth left open in a silent scream and eyes leaking waterfalls. 

Lucas presses his cheek to the ground, opens his eyes (When did he close them? Why did he close them?), and gasps again, although for a completely different reason. The angle he’s looking in gives him a brilliant view of the sun, pales and pastels and pinks and oranges and yellows and blues swirling above the wall of stone, and he’s reminded of the sun when he looked outside the airplane window, bright and beaming like new beginnings.

The roar in his head starts to fade away, and he pushes himself up on his feet with trembling arms. He can feel the imprint of the floor pressed on his cheek as he looks at the destruction he’s caused in the garden. 

Leaves and roots and weeds are sprawled across the floor ( _dead bodies on the street, rotting flesh filling his nose, crystal water tainted red_ ), bits of rock are scattered across the floor, broken from where they’ve smashed against the wall ( _water hitting the glass, shattering the windows and the single book page and the screams, oh the_ screams-), blood is splattered around the floor, still dripping from his hands and his knees. They’re smeared all over the stone ( _the hospital floor tile, covered with dirt and bleach and blood and tears and the lives of a hundred and the deaths of a thousand more_ ), the red stark against the pale grey.

Lucas knows what he is—a tsunami, wrecking holidays and vacations and paradises, crashing through his family’s lives, their homes and their swimming pools and their resorts, with a scream of rushing water and a force that can knock even the strongest people off their feet. 

He made the world feel his rage, lurking under his panic attacks and sharp words, and when the tectonic plates have stopped shifting, when the rage has finally left and the storm has passed and the night has finished, he’s left with dead eyes and pills on the kitchen counter and crutches for his mum and special glasses for his dad and nightmares for kingdom come, filled with beasts and monsters with no knight in shining armour in sight. 

He knows this, knew it since he stepped off the plane in Singapore and his bare feet touched the airport floor and a dozen voices flooded the room, but Lucas somehow let himself forget, between the talking about stars at the witching hour with Thomas and playing football with Simon in the streets and the garden (now destroyed because of him—everything’s always destroyed because of him. What else is next? His life? His family? All he knows is that once he starts destroying, he never stops.) and the medication and the TV shows at midnight and the not breathing and the crutches for his mum and special glasses for his dad and nightmares and _oh god how could he forget?_

He’s sabotage and wickedness and greed and sin and poison and destruction and death and fire and the beast guarding the tower and the monster under the bed and the devil in its truest form and he’s-

_He’s the tsunami._

  
_i don't want to be controlled by the past  
if you were me, could you really blame me?_  


  
\- lola blanc, _angry too_  


Lucas feels skin touching him first, cool against his hands and knees and feet. The smell comes next, a concoction of stifling air and bleach and medicine and mud and a hundred other smells he can’t name, and of course, blood. (Blood haunts him day in and day out, in his peripherals and his nightmares, fresh on his tongue and stale on his fingers. He’ll recognise the smell of blood anywhere. He doesn’t think he could ever forget.)

A low murmur of words sneaks past the fog of sleepiness and confusion, and Lucas thinks they’re supposed to be comforting, but there is _skin_ on his _skin_ and _pain_ and _hurt_ and _confusion_ everywhere, so he twists his torso away from the hands and flails his limbs and cries out. Lucas can feel panic rising in his chest, but the movement wears him out quickly while the words rise in volume and the number of black dots in his vision duplicates into a swarm. The last thing he sees is a starburst of sparks behind his eyelids before he blacks out. 

He wakes up in flashes, but all his eyelids can do is flutter, and he can only see glimpses of things he knows aren’t there. ( _A dead dog, lying in the tall weeds, mouth open and flies on its tongue, buzzing and eating and chewing and flying and_ buzzing-). His hearing isn’t reliable either, with rushing water and ringing sounds drowning him, but Lucas thinks he can hear snippets of voices. (He thinks they might be calling his name.)

The pain skyrockets at some point, and he lets out a whimper and finally (finally!) opens his eyes for longer than a few moments. His mum is above him, blonde hair framing her face as she strokes his cheek and dabs his bloody hands with a wet towel. “Oh, Lucas,” she says. “Oh, _baby._ ” Her voice breaks. “I wish you knew how brave you are.” 

Lucas says nothing, but his eyes say _I’m not brave_ and _you’re a liar_ and _I’m hurting_ and _please make it stop hurting please_ and she must see it all, although he doesn’t know how, because she shushes his eyes and whispers in his ear, “I’m hurting too.” ( _“I’m scared too.”_ ) His dad comes in the room at some point, says nothing, but his warmth by his side is a thousand words all on its own.

Nobody tells Lucas what happened, but he sees words and hears silences, and can piece the story together by himself. (No stupid boy could survive the tsunami in one piece.) (Maybe that’s why he’s broken.) Simon found him, he realises, after his littlest brother avoids his eyes and hesitates before touching him. Simon found him, lying on the ground with smears of half-dried, half-tacky blood around and under him, with tears falling behind closed eyes on the floor of the garden surrounded by dead flowers and broken stones. ( _Sticks and stones may break these bones-_ )

Simon thought he was dead, he knows, when his brother wakes up with “Lucas!” (Now he knows why everyone always says Simon is the one most like their dad) on his lips in the room across the hall, and runs into Lucas’ room and puts a hand on his arm, as if to check if his body is still warm (and not cold, cold, cold with purple lips and pale cheeks, and seaweed resting on his skin). 

If Lucas isn’t warm enough, or his skin feels on the wrong side of cold (Unlikely. His air conditioning is off most days, because of both Japan’s weather and because cold air feels like _freezing water, slithering around on his skin, pouring into his mouth and stinging his eyes, making his hands shake even underwater-_ ), Simon will wiggle under the covers and press his body close against Lucas’, and they’ll both fall asleep that way. It’ll be one of the few nights where Lucas gets blissfully dark dreams instead of nightmares or insomnia, but his brother will always be gone by the time the morning comes.

His mum tells him the rest of the story, answering the questions in his eyes and his hands while she does some painful procedure on his feet that somehow always make him feel better later on. Simon screamed ( _“Lucas!”_ ) for help once he found him, and she was the first one to arrive. They moved him to the guest bedroom, and Lucas knows his blood dripped on the floor when they did it. (His dad would be the one to mop it up, and he ignores how broken his dad’s eyes must have been.) 

They found shards of porcelain, stones, and glass (Glass? When was there glass? He doesn’t remember any glass, but he doesn’t trust what he does remember, anyways. So.) in his feet and arms, and his mum had to remove them with miniature metal tools that glint in the artificial light. Lucas wonders what she felt when she removed tiny pieces coated with her son’s blood from his skin. (He wonders if her hands shook.)

Lucas can’t walk for a few days, which means no school for him (and he tries to ignore the relief he feels, in case the guilt tags along too), which means he’s stuck in the house, his brothers in school, his mum trying to earn money, and his dad going to an eye appointment, which means. He’s in the house. _Alone._

He’s never heard a silence like this before, not even when he was awake at night and everyone else was asleep, because, even then, he knew where they were and what they were doing, and that filled the silence all on its own. But now, the loneliness hits Lucas like a tsunami, hard and fast yet quiet all the same, and the walls seem to stretch on and on, each colour seeming too harsh and sounds too loud and his voice too quiet, too soft, too rough. (The loneliness had never hit him like this—not since the shadows slept on his face as he was surrounded by the products of dead families and a sticker on his shirt.)

He stares at his ceiling for the longest of times. At one point, his fists clenched the sheets and he had bitten his tongue. (He doesn’t remember what he was thinking about, but that’s okay; he’s gotten used to the feeling, anyway.) 

His wounds prevent him from leaving the bed (his mum, groaning on the door, screaming “I need antibiotics!” but they’re all in Thai and he doesn’t know which one, he doesn’t know-), and Lucas is forced to do nothing but watch the television and fiddle with some new console his parents had given him. He doesn’t know why they bought it for him—they’re already struggling on the financial side, even without all the frivolous fancy toys they’ve given him, but he suspects it might be an apology. (He knows there’s nothing to forgive. Now, if only they could believe it.) 

There are games where his avatar moves and talks in funny ways, and is content with making their own life and society on its own. (There was once a time where he wanted action games, ones with blood and gore and fights and guns, but he thinks he prefers the games he has now instead.) It’s something he thinks he wants to do if he has the strength for it, just run away and start his entire life from scratch, but he can’t abandon his family, his brothers and dad and mum (not again, at least), so he lives through the game instead. 

Soon, he finds himself lost in it, the words and the movements and the music and the peaceful life of his character. (Lucas quietly mourns the life he could have had, in a different world.) Once he resurfaces again, looking up from the screen, eyes watering, except this time he’s not crying (He might be, though.) ( _He doesn’t know-_ ), the time has passed so quickly that the arrows on the clock look dislocated. It scares him, for a moment, how the games make him lose time, just like school and drowning and the panic attacks, but it’s not the same. It’s not.

The rest of the day passes in a blur until his parents and brothers are back home and they’re all embracing in a hug lasting so long that his past self would have gotten embarrassed. (But not anymore.)

His brothers were jittery in school, he knows, even before the teachers email his parents their concerns, and it’s because he wasn’t there with them today. Guilt creeps in him, even more so when Thomas hugs him for a more few beats longer than usual and Simon almost cries when he sees him, but Lucas feels the guilt slightly recede when he reads them a bedtime story, even when Thomas declares that he’s too old for them, and they fall on his body, eyes delicately closed with thick eyelashes standing out against pale skin, fast asleep.

Lucas tips his head back until he can feel the hard headboard against his skull, and closes his eyes. The rhythmic breathing of both his brothers and quiet murmurs of the television downstairs soon lull him to sleep. He has no nightmares that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title from Swim by Alec Benjamin
> 
> content warning: insomnia (not described or mentioned in great detail), nightmares, claustrophobia, anger/rage attack, slight gore, self-blame, canonical violence and deaths/injuries, flashbacks


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